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The Blundering Gardener: Warm weather gave us another chance to finish chores

By Bonnie Blodgett

Posted:
12/08/2012 10:10:10 AM CST

Updated:
12/08/2012 10:10:15 AM CST

Savvy gardeners can avoid the tedium of yanking crabgrass out by its roots if they know how to work with corn gluten. (Thinkstock.com)

A column on lawn care in mid-December?

As I wrote this last week, the weather was balmy with a high of 50-something. It was a fine day for a gardening project.

Of course, I'd long since wrapped up the fall 2012 chores list: Tools are cleaned, sharpened and stored for the winter; the lawn mower is drained of gas and the oil changed, blade sharpened and sparkplugs unplugged; leaves are raked, bulbs planted, roses mulched, fountains drained and hoses hauled indoors.

I had no choice but to embark on a garden project using whatever tools had escaped my notice and were hiding under a pile of freshly fallen leaves or behind the rain barrel.

Here's a spade! It's rusty, but I can use it as a crowbar to pull up the flags in the stone path that needs widening and excavate the enlarged trench.

The path project got me up close and personal to the grass in my back yard. Midway through, it was plain my lawn was a mess. The drought had taken a brutal toll, and the canopies of trees I planted years ago were broader and denser than ever.

I spent the evening doing research and found some interesting information.

Corn gluten, or corn gluten meal, is a wonder product that skyrocketed to fame in the past decade.

It's a slightly sticky, dry-cereal-like byproduct of corn. It works by smothering weeds just as their plant parts are bursting out of seed.

Corn gluten is sold as an anti-germination agent, though I learned the weeds do germinate -- they just don't have long to live if they emerge in a sea of corn gluten meal.

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Once dirt cheap, corn gluten's price has quadrupled in 10 years, along with corn prices, generally thanks to pressure from a hungry Third World that wants to eat more meat -- most corn is grown to feed cattle -- and from corn-based ethanol production.

In the 1990s, corn gluten was touted as a cheaper alternative to chemical herbicides. It also was relatively harmless to microorganisms and wildlife, or so its proponents presumed.

As corn gluten caught on, it got the attention of the lawn-and-garden industry. These days, it's packaged in yellow plastic tubs under the brand name Preen and marketed as a weed killer and fertilizer. Corn gluten contains nitrogen, among other plant-friendly compounds, and nitrogen helps plants grow healthy green leaves.

Unfortunately, corn gluten is an equal opportunity herbicide-fertilizer. If it's not applied at the precise moment a weed is about to germinate (in April for most weeds), it has the opposite of the desired effect. Instead of snuffing out weeds, it helps them grow big and strong.

As iffy as corn gluten is in the garden bed, it's even less effective on grass. Even if applications are timed perfectly, it's not as easy for the product to latch onto those weed seeds that are the toughest of the tough -- dandelions and crabgrass.

Imagine the homeowner's horror, when, having spent all that money on a big suburban lawn, up come the weeds anyway and worse than ever.

I'm hoping that instead of switching to chemical herbicides, Americans will discover a perfect lawn doesn't have to resemble green wall-to-wall carpeting.

I'm hoping we'll rediscover the delights of the kind of lawn that used to be fashionable before the green revolution changed everything.

-- Our December heat wave gave us a window for bulb planting. Tulips still will bloom next spring if you plant them now.

-- Stone or cement containers left outdoors with soil and dead plants in them need to be rescued now or they'll crack when the soil expands in early spring. Pots should be emptied, cleaned and stored in a sheltered spot. If that's outdoors, turn them upside down.

-- Last week, I wrote about whiteflies and failed to mention one way of keeping them under control: yellow sticky traps. The flies are attracted to them. These work for aphids and spider mites, too.

-- Don't forget to keep watering the Christmas tree. Mine is extraordinarily thirsty this year, probably because of the drought. I've been refilling the water container every day. Make sure your tree can take up that water, by the way. Ask the seller at the tree lot to saw a few inches off the trunk at the base. This has the same effect as opening the lid on a can of pop.